Related papers: Stochastic Gradient Annealed Importance Sampling f…

In this paper we consider Bayesian estimation for the parameters of inverse Gaussian distribution. Our emphasis is on Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. We provide complete implementation of the Gibbs sampler algorithm. Assuming an…

Importance sampling is a technique that is commonly used to speed up Monte Carlo simulation of rare events. However, little is known regarding the design of efficient importance sampling algorithms in the context of queueing networks. The…

This article presents a Bayesian inferential method where the likelihood for a model is unknown but where data can easily be simulated from the model. We discretize simulated (continuous) data to estimate the implicit likelihood in a…

In Bayesian statistics, many problems can be expressed as the evaluation of the expectation of a quantity of interest with respect to the posterior distribution. Standard Monte Carlo method is often not applicable because the encountered…

We introduce a generalization of the Adaptive Multilevel Splitting algorithm in the discrete time dynamic setting, namely when it is applied to sample rare events associated with paths of Markov chains. By interpreting the algorithm as a…

Markov random fields (MRFs) are difficult to evaluate as generative models because computing the test log-probabilities requires the intractable partition function. Annealed importance sampling (AIS) is widely used to estimate MRF partition…

Sampling from matrix generalized inverse Gaussian (MGIG) distributions is required in Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for a variety of statistical models. However, an efficient sampling scheme for the MGIG distributions has not…

Gibbs sampling is the de facto Markov chain Monte Carlo method used for inference and learning on large scale graphical models. For complicated factor graphs with lots of factors, the performance of Gibbs sampling can be limited by the…

We consider the efficient use of an approximation within Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), with subsequent importance sampling (IS) correction of the Markov chain inexact output, leading to asymptotically exact inference. We detail…

Bayesian inference for models that have an intractable partition function is known as a doubly intractable problem, where standard Monte Carlo methods are not applicable. The past decade has seen the development of auxiliary variable Monte…

Doubly intractable distributions arise in many settings, for example in Markov models for point processes and exponential random graph models for networks. Bayesian inference for these models is challenging because they involve intractable…

Probabilistic models in physics often require from the evaluation of normalized Boltzmann factors, which in turn implies the computation of the partition function Z. Getting the exact value of Z, though, becomes a forbiddingly expensive…

Bayesian inference in the presence of an intractable likelihood function is computationally challenging. When following a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach to approximate the posterior distribution in this context, one typically…

We describe an adaptive importance sampling algorithm for rare events that is based on a dual stochastic control formulation of a path sampling problem. Specifically, we focus on path functionals that have the form of cumulate generating…

In this paper we study simulation-based methods for estimating gradients in stochastic networks. We derive a new method of calculating weak derivative estimator using importance sampling transform, and our method has less computational cost…

Markov chain (MC) algorithms are ubiquitous in machine learning and statistics and many other disciplines. Typically, these algorithms can be formulated as acceptance rejection methods. In this work we present a novel estimator applicable…

We propose a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from high dimensional probability distributions that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. We provide a careful theoretical analysis, including guarantees on robustness to…

Bayesian inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is challenging when the likelihood function is irregular and expensive to compute. We explore several sampling algorithms that make use of subset evaluations to reduce computational…

The estimation of the probability of rare events is an important task in reliability and risk assessment. We consider failure events that are expressed in terms of a limit state function, which depends on the solution of a partial…

This paper presents a control variate-based Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for efficient sampling from the probability simplex, with a focus on applications in large-scale Bayesian models such as latent Dirichlet allocation. Standard…